I want to tell you something I’ve believed for 35 years, and it still surprises people when I say it out loud: the workshop was never going to save your culture.
Every few months, a company has a very public bad day. An outage. A recall. A leaked email. A decision that looked brilliant in the boardroom and looked like a disaster on the front page by lunchtime.
And every single time, leadership reaches for the same limp bandaid: let’s run a workshop. One hour, tea and biscuits, “Courageous Conversations” on the calendar, tick the box, everyone goes back to pretending it’s fine.
It doesn’t work. It was never going to. 😒 This is exactly what I unpack in this week’s episode — so if you’d rather listen than read, hit play below. If you’re a reader like me first thing in the morning, keep going.
Here’s what I actually believe: values don’t embed through a session. They embed through people. Specific people, spread through the organisation, who model the behaviour daily and get coached to keep doing it when nobody’s clapping.
That’s not a training day. That’s leading change, properly.
WHY it takes champions, not workshops
John Kotter figured this out decades ago and it’s still true: change that survives isn’t driven top-down by a memo or sideways by a session. It’s carried by a coalition — people scattered through the business who believe it, live it, and quietly hold the line when everyone else reverts to old habits under pressure.
A workshop gives you a room full of nodding heads for an hour. A champion network gives you someone in every team, every week, doing the thing when it’s inconvenient — modelling the hard conversation, calling out the value being ignored, making courage look normal instead of risky.
Neuroscience backs this too, and it’s one of my favourite things to talk about on the show. Safety is a pattern-recognition problem. Brains don’t believe “it’s safe to speak up here” because they were told once. They believe it because they watched it happen, repeatedly, close to them, from someone credible. That’s what a champion does that a facilitator, however brilliant, cannot.
This is also why “just be more courageous” is useless advice — and honestly, one of my pet peeves. Courage isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a brain state. Under threat, the brain narrows, defends, and avoids. Champions and coaching work precisely because they train the brain to recognise a hard conversation as safe rather than dangerous, on repeat, until the nervous system stops flinching.
A workshop is designed to end. It has an agenda, a start time, a finish time, a feedback form. Culture change has none of those things. The moment your culture strategy has a finish line, you’ve told everyone it was temporary.
WHAT actually works
Four ingredients — and I go deeper on each of these in the episode:
1. Values get embedded through champions, not decrees.
Not a poster on the wall. A living network of people at every level who’ve been equipped — properly, not with a laminated card — to notice when a value is being lived or ignored, and say something.
2. Coaching, not one-off training.
Skills fade. Coaching sustains. The leaders who actually change are the ones with someone in their corner over months, not a facilitator they met once.
3. The behaviour becomes infrastructure, not initiative.
Champions plus coaching only works if it’s built into how the business already runs — team meetings, one-on-ones, performance conversations — not bolted on as extra homework nobody has time for.
4. It has to be brain-based, not just behaviour-based.
This is where my Leadership Brain Framework™ and Courageous Conversation DOD™ come in — the specific sequence, Define, Own, Deliver, that keeps a leader regulated enough to have the conversation instead of avoiding it or blowing it up. I walk through a real example of this in the episode.
HOW we do this in practice
This is precisely the gap I built Worksparks to close. Champion networks and coaching are powerful — and notoriously hard to sustain and scale. Most organisations know they need this and simply can’t operationalise it.
Worksparks embeds it — giving every leader, not just the top table, structured coaching and courageous-conversation practice inside the flow of their actual work. It’s the infrastructure that makes “embed values through champions and coaching” something you can actually run at scale, not just aspire to
RESULTS
I’ve watched this play out inside leadership teams navigating real trust and culture pressure — not headline scandal, but internally every bit as damaging. The shift was never in what people started saying. It was in what they became willing to say, without needing a script, a prompt, or a calendar invite. And it held, months later, long after the workshop crowd had moved on.
That’s the real marker of change that’s actually led, not just announced.
🎧 This week on Leadership with Sonia, I talk about leadership, courage and more. Have a listen wherever you get your podcasts, and if it lands for you, a rating or review helps more people find the show.
If this is where your organisation is right now — culture under pressure, values that need to move from a poster to daily practice — this is exactly what I speak on, coach on, and design workshops around. Keen to talk it through? Get in touch below.
What’s actually helped your team change lasting behaviour, not just a moment of it? Hit reply — I read every single one, and I love pulling these into future episodes.
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